


Holodeck II

by Sunhawk16



Series: Holodeck [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 20:56:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14777100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunhawk16/pseuds/Sunhawk16
Summary: Still working backward through LiveJournal.  This was posted in 2015 as a sort of Halloween fic. Again, by working backward it is a sequel to Holodeck which hasn't been posted here yet.





	Holodeck II

**Author's Note:**

> Still working backward through LiveJournal. This was posted in 2015 as a sort of Halloween fic. Again, by working backward it is a sequel to Holodeck which hasn't been posted here yet.

It took me an effing hour to stop thinking like a boyfriend. I’m pretty annoyed by that fact, and I probably wasted another five or ten minutes speculating that maybe the rule about relationships and partners had some valid points, but damn it…. This partner/relationship thing is still pretty new. 

I give myself a pass. 

But once I stopped thinking like a boyfriend and started thinking like a partner, and I ran my day through its mental rerun again… it was kind of stupid that I’d let Duo get away with not talking to me. 

He blew a holodeck training run. Screwed the whole mission. Botched our points, botched our standing, botched our record and then… shut down like an anal retentive, slightly pissy clam. 

No explanation for why he’d suddenly stopped in the middle of a virtual street, in the middle of a virtual gunfight, in the middle of a virtual mission and just…. stood there staring with his mouth hanging open. At what, he never told me. 

I’d ended up taking a virtual bullet to my not so virtual leg to keep him virtually alive long enough to push the purely mental ‘tag out’ button that had ended the run. 

My ‘What the fuck, Maxwell?’ had gotten me about thirty seconds of a look that had been… Weird. Scared? Disoriented? Upset? Remorseful? Freaked out? I don’t know…. Thirty seconds wasn’t long enough to decide before it was covered up with the pissy clam routine. 

He’d stormed out and then I’d stormed out and we’d gone our separate ways. 

I should have followed him and not relented until he’d told me ‘what the fuck’. Because ‘what the fuck’ was a question that needed to be answered. Duo’s partner wouldn’t have relented. Even if he’d had to follow him all the way home and sit on his chest to do it. 

Duo’s boyfriend, however, had hesitated… just as concerned as the partner, but in a slightly different way. Boyfriends have to worry about boundaries and feelings and crap like that. 

It was about six thirty at night before I decided, fuck that shit… Duo is my partner and he could just deal with it. I got up off my couch, pulled my cell off the charger and called him, fully intending to get my answers. 

Except he didn’t answer. 

So at about six forty-five I headed out to drive over to his place; probably for the best anyway. Some questions are better asked in person.

A drive that normally takes ten minutes took me almost a half a damn hour while I navigated the obstacle course of ‘trick or treaters’. Begger’s Night is a concept that just escapes me. And while the damn little beggers running around everywhere, getting in my way, and waving their loot at each other was annoying… It also provided a possible explanation for why Duo hadn’t answered his phone. 

I hate Halloween. It is a stupid concept that does nothing but encourage delinquent behavior in my humble opinion.

Duo loves Halloween. And is usually out doing enough encouraging for a platoon. He was probably out on his porch with his array of artfully carved pumpkins, dressed like Death and doling candy out to brats that were ballsy enough to brave his demented presence. 

I’d completely forgotten what day it was, when I’d stormed home from work, and was surprised to find that I was somewhat reassured to maybe have some explanation for both Duo ignoring my call, and maybe even for his weird distraction. 

Only… When I pulled up in front of Duo’s place, he was not on the front porch. In fact, he proved to not be home at all. The lights were out, and more telling… His car was not there. 

I briefly considered checking with some of the other guys to see if maybe there was a party I didn’t know about, but really… If there had been, I’d have been invited too. Or Duo would have at least told me about it. 

So seven thirty at night and I turned my car toward the Preventer’s building and started thinking about what I was going to say after ‘What the fuck, Maxwell?’ if I didn’t get an answer this damn time. 

I wanted to be surprised when I parked next to his car in the lot, but really… I should have known. The closest I’d come to cataloging that look he’d had when we came out of the virtual cluster-fuck had been… Upset/freaked out/scared. 

Duo does not tolerate something scaring him. If something is freaky, it must be examined. If something is gross, it must be gotten used to. If something is scary… It must be grabbed by the balls and beaten into submission. 

Sure as hell wish I knew what it was he was beating on. 

When I walked into the Holo room, I found a tech that I knew belonged to the same basketball team Duo played on, so I knew which connections he’d exploited to get somebody to open up the lab after hours and run the Sim for him. 

Tucker, I believe, was his name, and when I came around the corner into the lab, I found him sitting in the control room with his feet up on the console, his chair tilted back and his cell phone to his ear.

‘…real sorry, honey, but there was an emergency with the network. Real high level stuff. Should only be a couple of hours, but there’s just no way I can be there to take the kids out trick-or-treating…’

I almost laughed. If the guy’s wife was buying this line of bull, she needed a clue. I revised my thought about exploitation. Duo had only offered the guy an easy excuse.

I cleared my throat and watched him scramble.

‘…gotta go, honey. I’ll call you.’ His feet hit the floor before the cell phone got shoved back in his pocket. ‘Uh…. Agent Yuy! Are you… uh… I mean… Duo said… I mean, Agent Maxwell said he was running solo… I mean…’

‘Stop before you swallow your damn tongue,’ I told him and walked on toward the actual Holodeck room. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

Tucker was quick to follow after me, trying desperately to not swallow his tongue. This whole business was a pretty decent sized breach of protocol.

Duo was back on the sensory couch where I’d seen him last, right before the clamming and storming parts. He’d obviously been home, as he was out of uniform… Dressed in jeans and an over-sized flannel shirt that had seen better days. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anybody lying on one of those damn benches in civvies before and I found it added an extra layer of weird to the whole thing.

‘Look, Agent Yuy…’ Tucker began, all but wringing his hands and watching his career develop a rather large dent. 

‘Shut up,’ I told him bluntly, not really liking the frown on Duo’s face, nor the level of his pulse rate on the stats panel. ‘I’m well aware of how persuasive Duo can be. I’m pretty sure this was all his idea, despite it working out fairly well to get you out of having to drag a couple of sugar rushed kids all over town. I don’t really give a damn about that part. What Sim is he running?’

Tucker continued to wring his hands, but stopped stuttering. ‘The same one you guys ran at the end of the day today; UAN53.’

‘And why the hell did he tell you he wanted to run it again without his partner?’

‘He said he thought the program had a glitch. He said he saw something weird and he wanted a walk through before he reported it.’

‘How long has he been in?’ I asked, trying to calculate how far into the mission he’d be, assuming he was following the ‘path’. 

Tucker had to look, which didn’t give me any warm/fuzzies that he’d actually been doing any monitoring here. ‘About twenty minutes.’

Damn little beggers. If I’d been able to make good time driving over to Duo’s place, I might have caught him.

‘Ok…’ I began, about to deliver a lecture concerning his job, and the responsibility of the ‘tech on duty’, when the pulse monitor on Duo’s couch went through the roof. He made a funny little sound… which is not unheard of for an agent in the middle of one of these mindfucks, but unusual enough that we both looked at him.

So we were looking right at his face when the gash just appeared on his cheek.

You may get beat to hell in the Holodeck, you may even get dead or otherwise mangled. But it’s all in your head. It would get way too expensive to maim agents at the rate it happened in Holo training. It is not real. Disorienting? Hell yeah. Painful? You bet your ass. Are you taking your psyche into your hands when you lie down on that couch? There have been studies.

But it is not real.

The blood trickling down Duo’s face was as real as Pinocchio after the blue lady got done with him. I touched it just to make sure. The skin on Duo’s cheek was indeed gashed.

‘Pull him!’ I bellowed, gratified to see that Tucker was moving for the emergency over-ride before I had to tell him to. Maybe the guy knew his damn job after all.

I’ve only seen one other emergency shutdown in a Holo session. An agent had a freaking heart attack on the couch. It took less than thirty seconds, and had given migraine headaches to the guy’s two partners who had come out with him.

A normal mission end always has a gateway of some sort. A door you walk through… A gate… A portal… Something that gives your mind a chance to transition from _there_ to _here_. From the not real to the real. They don’t like to just rip you out the hard/fast way. It does things. The day of the heart attack incident, the first guy had come out puking and the other one clutching his head and moaning about the jeep he’d been driving just two seconds before. It wasn’t pretty.

But this was different. If this didn’t qualify as an emergency, I didn’t know what did.

And it took me way longer than thirty seconds to wander down the memory lane of that other time. But Tucker was still cussing and keyboard mashing and Duo was still on the couch. Not clutching his head, puking or otherwise coming into the here. Just lying there with blood trickling down his cheek.

‘Hurry the fuck up!’ I yelled helpfully.

‘I’m fucking trying!’ Tucker yelled back, no more helpful than I.

I moved over next to him at the main console, half baked intentions of shoving him aside and doing it myself forgotten when I got there and could see that the guy did know his business and what he was doing just… wasn’t working the way it should have.

I could see the level on the side monitor, and knew right were Duo was… The same damn place he’d frozen last time. It was a street, there was an alley and there were abandoned cars and there were perps and there was going to be gunfire if there wasn’t already.

And Duo was not moving on the grid map.

Tucker was moving, but nothing was happening.

Behind us, Duo made another noise and when I went back to him… there was blood on his arm.

‘Put me in!’ I yelled, moving for the other couch before my brain had even registered the decision. Being here wasn’t doing me a damn bit of good, and I knew what was going on there and if something didn’t happen soon… 

My brain didn’t much want to register that either. 

I didn’t wait for Tucker, just started attaching the electrode patches myself and climbing onto the couch. We did this often enough I knew what the fuck needed to happen on my end, and I needed him to be doing what needed to happen on his.

‘I don’t know,’ Tucker was muttering. ‘Nothing is responding… I’m not sure… Oh wait… Maybe? No, stupid…. This! Yes, here! I think… maybe…’

I hate people who talk to themselves while they work. 

And then I was in. I would have shouted my congratulations or my thanks or my ‘about damn time!’, but it wouldn’t have been my real life mouth saying the words, so I just ran.

There hadn’t been any finesse to the transition, and unfortunately he hadn’t dropped me neatly by Duo’s side. But at least I knew precisely where he was and I went about getting myself there as fast as possible.

I reached for my gun, knowing that I would have three targets to take out once I arrived on the scene, and was shocked as hell that I didn’t find it at my hip. In fact… I was not geared up at all. It was unheard of. It’s part of the program… You arrive ‘in game’ completely outfitted for the mission. I should have been in camo gear… I should have had a knife strapped to my left arm… I should have had a hand gun on each hip… Should have been running in combat boots. 

But I was dressed exactly as I had been when I laid down on that bench and that was just freaking impossible because the program is just not that damn good.

Which meant Duo might not be either. No gun. No weapon. And no damn Kevlar. 

I had half a block to get my head out of ‘boyfriend’ mode again, and back into ‘partner’. I did not need to get to Duo… I needed to get to Duo’s attackers. 

I altered my run and went to the right side of the street instead of the left. Having run this mission once, I knew where the bad guys were hunkered down. And if Duo was here for whatever in the hell had freaked him out the first time, then he was… 

There. Right where he’d stopped the last time. Standing out in the open in plain damn sight staring down a dark side alley. Ignoring the perps like they weren’t even there. His cheek dripping blood…. The arm of his flannel shirt stained dark. I… am really not even sure why he was still alive. He was making no effort to take cover, and the gunmen were just a program with no emotion… Just playing out their parts. If this were real, maybe his ignoring getting shot would have baffled them… Made them hesitate, but these were just programs and they should not have just stood there exchanging uneasy glances.

The first one never saw me coming, I came over the hood of the car he was crouched behind and took him to the pavement with one hard kick to the side of his head. He landed in a heap, with his virtual neck at an unnatural angle no matter what reality you were in, and I had his gun in my hands before his last virtual breath left him.

Number two was gawping at me like he was trying to catch flies and I put a bullet between his eyes for his trouble. The third one made a run for it, something that should not have happened and I didn’t hesitate to shoot him in the back. I couldn’t afford them coming back. Just pixals and bits, after all, none of this was real. Even if the damage they were somehow doing to Duo was.

Impossibly, unbelievably, insanely real.

Nothing here was behaving as it should have, so I kept the gun in my hand and my attention on my surroundings while I made my way over to Duo.

He was still just standing there, staring down the dark alley, ignoring the fact that he’d been shot twice like it just didn’t matter. And were things behaving as they should, I suppose it wouldn’t really matter. He had no way of knowing that the hole in his arm was going to follow him back to reality.

But still… Duo has issues with the Holodeck even more than most. His virtual reality is usually a bit more real to him. I’m usually the one reminding him that it’s all in our collective head.

‘Maxwell,’ I growled at him when I was close enough, falling back on the original question, since I’d not really ever formulated another. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Heero?’ he asked, though he had trouble tearing his eyes away from the alley to actually look at me. ‘What… What the hell are you doing here?’

Like I’d followed him out of town. Stalked him to Berlin or some damn place.

‘I came in to save your sorry ass,’ I told him, tugging at the ruined sleeve of his shirt, trying to ignore the creepy, creepy feeling it was giving me knowing that he could not be wearing that shirt here. It wasn’t possible.

He pulled away from me, looking back at the alley and muttering darkly. ‘Doesn’t matter. I didn’t come back in for the mission.’

I was starting to get a little bit angry and I let him know it. ‘Fuck if it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but you’re bleeding out there too.'

‘What?’ he said, and while I’d thought he was a little wide-eyed before, it was nothing to what he managed then. But at least I had his attention away from whatever the hell kept drawing it down that alley.

‘That’s why I came in,’ and while ‘boyfriend’ was wanting to take him into my arms and pull him away toward a gate, was wanting to press that mental ‘abandon ship’ command… the ‘partner’ was afraid it wouldn’t work. Tucker couldn’t pull him out… I was afraid if I dropped out, he might not come with me.

Nothing was working the way it should, so everything was suspect.

But both the partner and the boyfriend were in concert with wanting Duo the hell out.

‘Listen to me…’ I began, and that’s when the thing in the alley decided to make its presence known.

It was nothing more than a footstep. A scuff of a shoe on concrete. Deliberate. Calculated.

Duo jumped like he’d been shot. Again.

We both turned and the kid standing there was… Kind of anti-climatic, to be honest. I don’t really know what I’d been expecting at that point, a fucking dragon, or a pack of slathering three-heads dogs, just… something more than a scruffy, under-fed looking street kid.

‘Shit,’ Duo breathed, and I had that sense again of not knowing what was going on inside his head. Just…. that same scared/disoriented/upset/remorseful/freaked out/all of the above business.

‘Hey, asshole,’ the scruffy kid said, just like he was greeting an old friend. It was smug. It was cocky. Beside me, Duo shivered hard.

‘Bullshit,’ he said, and I couldn’t have told you if he was talking to me, or the kid, or to himself. ‘Fucking bullshit. I parsed the code. I scanned the whole damn program. You’re not here. You’re not fucking here anywhere.’

‘Sure looks like I am,’ the kid said and he took a step out of the alley into the more lighted street. As he did, more figures appeared behind him, filling the mouth of the alley.

Street kids. An entire pack of them. Scruffy, and thin, clothes tattered and… wrong, somehow. Old. Like something from a period movie. Things were beyond weird. Beyond impossible.

Duo took a step toward them and I stuck to his side like glue.

‘You’re dead,’ he told the boy, and it came out like some sort of damn spell. A mantra. Like he expected the line to make them all vanish. It just made the scruffy boy chuckle darkly.

‘Yep,’ he said agreeably. ‘We’re dead, because you let us die.’

Duo was still for a minute and then he took another step forward, but this time I reached out and took hold of his good arm. I didn’t have a fucking clue what was happening here, but I felt we were close enough to the pack of impossible, non-existent, dead children.

He pretty much ignored me, but at least he stopped moving.

‘I didn’t let you die,’ he told the boy, but it only bought him a flash of a bitter, dark smile.

‘Then you want to explain why we’re all dead?’

‘You’re dead because of the damn plague…’ Duo began, and the whole lot of them scuffed forward a bit more, gathering at the back of the boy who was obviously the leader.

‘Yeah?’ the boy grinned, ‘and why aren’t you dead?’

‘I… I don’t know…’ Duo mumbled, and under my hand I felt him leaning slightly forward and I knew if I hadn’t been there, holding him back, he’d have taken another step toward them.

It seemed like a really, really bad idea.

‘Bought your life with ours?’ the boy asked suddenly, and grinned that feral grin again. ‘And how come you won’t say my name?’

That made Duo stiffen beside me and his temper seemed to flare a bit. ‘You’re not Solo,’ he snapped. ‘Solo would never have…’

‘Condemned you for leaving him behind?’ the boy said. ‘Maybe dying gives a guy a different perspective.’

‘I didn’t leave you behind, damn it!’ Duo yelled at him, but the anger was gone and it was more like… anguish. ‘You were dead!’

‘Dead,’ the boy parroted, ‘because you didn’t save us. Not a one of us. But you lived, didn’t you? How was that? Out of all us orphans, how come you didn’t get the plague too?’

‘I don’t know…’ Duo breathed, and somewhere in that breath the boy went from not-Solo to being Solo… I could feel it. And the pack just seemed that much more solid behind him.

Pixals and damn bits, I reminded myself. Virtual orphans in a virtual alley in a virtual city inside my damn head. Inside… inside Duo’s damn head.

Guess when you got right down to it… I was just a visitor.

‘Bought your way off the streets with your street family,’ Solo was saying. ‘And then bought your way off L2 with your church family. Wonder what you bought your way out of with your real family?’

Duo didn’t speak, but I could feel he was starting to shake.

The gun was still in my hand, and I’ll be honest… real or virtual or a ghost or a damn bit of undigested beef… I came very close to shooting the little bastard right between the eyes in that moment.

But whatever he was now, he was obviously wearing the face of somebody who had meant something to Duo at some point in his life, so I slipped the pistol into my pocket so I could use both hands.

‘Maxwell,’ I called to him, trying to drag his attention away from the… Whatever the hell it was. ‘Come away. It’s time to tag out. We’re going to get Tucker in trouble.’

‘Sure,’ Solo jeered, ‘leave us behind again. Not like we matter to anybody. Especially now that we’re dead…’

It honestly surprised me, that the boy had reacted to something I’d said. I’d begun to suspect they weren’t even aware of me.

‘I tried…’ Duo said, still staring at the ghosts of his past, and talking almost as though only to himself. ‘I tried…’

‘Didn’t try hard enough,’ Solo said and his little pack echoed his words from behind him.

‘Didn’t try… didn’t try… didn’t try…’

Duo was leaning again, and I wrapped both arms around his torso and pulled him against me. Hell if he was getting any closer to the little monsters.

Solo bought the distance anyway, stepping out into the street. There was enough light to see the smirk. 

‘And what are you going to buy your way out of with… _him?’_

In my arms Duo shivered so hard it was a quake. I felt him suck for air and I felt him go cold and something was going to come out of his mouth, but I didn’t wait for it.

‘Fuck you, you little asshole,’ I snapped. ‘He didn’t leave you… you left him!’

‘All the same in the end, isn’t it?’ Solo asked, and I wanted to wipe that smirk right the hell off that face that was so young, and yet… wasn’t. ‘We’re dead and he’s not.’

Duo’s partner had played Rambo and come charging in to his rescue, but it suddenly came to me that what he needed now wasn’t his partner so much as his boyfriend. His lover.

And that would be me.

I turned Duo around in my arms and I forced him to look away from that… figment. That ghost. Those pixals and bits.

Because I wasn’t talking to those pixals. I wasn’t arguing with those bits.

I was talking to Duo. He said at the very beginning that he’d scanned the program and those dead children standing in front of us… weren’t there.

‘He’s alive because he’s tough,’ I said gently. ‘He’s alive because the world needed him to live and grow strong and help save it.’

‘Bought it…’ Solo tried, but I was done listening to that voice.

‘Yeah, you bought your life,’ I told Duo. ‘You bought it with your pain, and your blood, and your sweat. You lived and they didn’t because… damn it; that’s just the way things work sometimes.’

‘Sell you someday too…’ somebody said, and Duo tried to turn to look back over his shoulder at the one who was voicing the things in his head.

I wouldn’t let him. I brought a hand up and cupped his cheek and made him meet my eyes.

‘I love you,’ I told him, and it might have been for the first time in actual words…. I’m not even sure. I thought he knew it, but maybe he needed to hear it out loud. Or maybe he knew it and that was what brought this whole thing on. I don’t know. I doubt I’ll ever know. ‘I love you and I’m not ever going to leave you.’

‘Heero…’ he breathed and I finally damn well had his undivided attention. He was staring in my eyes like a drowning man.

Sooner or later, everybody dies. Some die young and some die old and some die sudden and some linger. But everybody dies. But I think Duo knows that, and I didn’t think that was the issue here.

The issue is the surviving. The issue is the one who goes on. Why me? Why not them?

‘You’re here because I needed you to be,’ I told him and then I kissed him.

When I pulled back, there wasn’t any smug response… the street was very quiet. I refused to look toward the alley, and I wouldn’t let Duo look either. I turned our backs on it and I walked us down the street and took us through the gate because sometimes… You need that transition from the _here_ to the _there_.

When we came back to reality, the room was a thing of chaos. While we’d been off in Holo-hell, Tucker had decided he was in over his damn head and had called his boss, confessed his sins, and begged for help.

I opened my eyes to find the room full of techs and medical personnel, and after that it was just a whirlwind of shit happening. We stuck with the ‘glitch’ story and the hole in Duo’s arm took ‘glitch’ to a whole new level. By the time they’d carted us out to sick bay, the whole Holo system had been shutdown and they were beginning a complete scan, and going over the thing with a fine toothed comb.

I wished them luck. I had a feeling it was not something they were ever going to figure out. 

It was something like four in the morning before I had Duo home and ensconced in my bed. His wounds were dressed and he was lightly drugged and would probably sleep well into the afternoon.

I fetched my laptop and settled into the bed beside him, just not comfortable with leaving him alone. I watched him sleep by the dim glow of the screen for awhile and then I set to work.

I connected in to the Preventer network and set about erasing mission UAN53 like it had never existed. I erased the recordings, because nobody needed to see that moment between me and Duo. I erased the entire program because nobody would ever pass the entrance to that alley again. I drilled down into the backup server and I nuked every instance of the entire server as far back as it existed. Then I formatted the hard drive on the database server on my way out.

And Monday morning, if I could manage it, I’d sprinkle some damn holy water on the hardware, and stuff a clove of garlic in an open drive bay.

Because I still don’t know what in the hell happened for sure. Was that all in Duo’s head? Could he really believe in the virtual landscape so damn hard that he could cause himself physical harm? Or was that some malicious spirit that had slipped through the cracks of All Hallows Eve? 

I had no doubt the entire Holo system would be down for weeks at the very least, while the techs went over it and tested it and tried their hardest to reproduce what had happened to Duo. And eventually, it would go back on-line. Because it was a valuable tool that wasn’t going to go away because of one unexplainable incident. 

I also had no doubt that as soon as that system went on-line, Duo would be the first in line to go back in. Because that’s what he does when something scares him. When the horse throws Duo Maxwell, the horse will not only be ridden again, it will be sporting a black eye and be packing for Bermuda when he’s done.

And it’s not like I could stop him anyway, but… I’ll have to let him go. 

That stupid tenacity is part of what attracted me to him in the first damn place.

But UAN53? Never again. That might have been Duo… That might have been a glitch… that might have been a damn ghost. 

I just don’t know, all I really know is watching Duo listen to the voices… Watching some part of him believe them, was the scariest thing _I’ve_ ever been through. 

I have my own brand of tenacity, and… some things I just don’t need to throw myself at again. 

Beside me Duo blinked sleepily and I could tell he was looking for me. I closed the lid on my laptop and slid down beside him. 

‘I’m right here,’ I murmured. 

‘Love you too,’ he whispered and he settled into my arms and went back to sleep. 

I waited until the sun rose to join him… just to be on the safe side.


End file.
